Mr. Spaceman

by Robert Olen Butler

  “Me too,” Viola says. “You beam me up anytime you want some help shopping.”

  The two women laugh and Jared is shaking my hand. I turn to him. “This is all so out-there,” he says.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  He moves along to the warm murmuring of my wife and I expect to find Citrus next but it is Hank grasping my forearm with his free hand as we shake. “Drive safely,” I say. “But not until your wheels touch the highway.”

  “You be safe, too,” he says, and he steps to Edna.

  Claudia, Hudson, and Citrus are the only ones remaining outside the bus and they are all hanging back, shifting their feet and trying, I think, to be the last one to say good-bye.

  “There is no time to hesitate,” I say to them, and Claudia shoots the other two a little disgusted glance and comes forward.

  “Good-bye, Desi,” she says. “Thanks for answering at least one of the big questions.”

  “You are not alone,” I say.

  Claudia smiles. “Neither are you,” she says.

  “Wait,” I cry, suddenly remembering the glint of metal in the Hall of Objects. “I still have your pistol.”

  “Keep it,” she says. “That’s one small step for woman.”

  Claudia lowers her face abruptly, I believe to hide the tears, and she moves on.

  I turn and I find Hudson turning, too, and we are both failing to see Citrus. Hudson shakes his head. “She’s trouble, man.”

  “I am sure she will show up when you get on the bus.”

  Hudson nods and extends his hand and I shake it. “Look,” he says. “Your orders don’t require you to maximize the risk, do they?”

  “No,” I say. “I do not read them that way.”

  “Then don’t. Find yourself a nice quiet place.”

  “But it cannot be quiet. This impression I make will have to last.”

  Hudson shrugs and he softly claps me on the shoulder. “Then try to take care of your skinny ass, you hear?”

  “Meeting you was money from home,” I say.

  Hudson is briefly confused by this but then he smiles.

  He steps away, toward my wife Edna Bradshaw, and she says to him, “You sure you don’t want me to wrap up a piece of the sweet potato pie for you?”

  And as Hudson begins politely to decline this offer, Citrus’s voice whispers close to my ear, “I will not deny you thrice. Not even once.”

  “Good,” I say and she is very near, turned the same way I am, as if she is hiding behind me.

  “Remember,” Citrus says, “He did not climb down from the cross. He saved others, Himself he could not save.”

  “I am a friendly guy,” I say.

  “New York,” she says.

  “A regular Joe,” I say.

  “Times Square. It’s your Calvary.”

  “What is this?” my wife Edna Bradshaw says. “You cute little thing, still wearing that stuff on your lips makes them look like they’re about to fall off from the barn rot, you come on over here and say good-bye to your friend Edna and make a promise to let me do you a makeover someday.”

  Edna has dragged Citrus by the hand toward her, but Citrus jerks free and lurches back toward me.

  “Please,” she says. And she stands before me, not sure herself what she is to do. “Father,” she whispers. Then, “Master.” She closes her eyes and a dark thing comes over her and she opens her eyes and she slides up against me and she kisses me on the cheek.

  I see my destiny. Millions of eyes are upon me. I descend and the eyes grow wide and the bodies surge and the hands clutch.

  “You go on, get aboard now,” Edna is saying.

  The press and heat of Citrus is gone from me now.

  I look and she is going up into the bus and Hank is standing there in the doorway, turning aside to let Citrus pass, but he is looking at me.

  Then there is only Hank in the doorway and he squares around. “Mr. Desi,” he says.

  The crowd is still in my head. A million voices—two million—rise in fear and then in rage and I am aflame, A Flame with Such a Burning Desire. For what? For what?

  Hank says, “You should appear in New Orleans. They might understand there.”

  “The Big Easy,” I say.

  “It’s just down the highway.”

  “Let the Good Times Roll,” I say.

  “I’m sure they’ve got a big party tonight,” he says. “Plenty of media.”

  “Thank you for the suggestion.”

  “I’d be comfortable there,” Hanks says, and he winks and he nods and he disappears into the dimness of the bus and the door closes.

  Then a hand and arm of my wife Edna Bradshaw comes in through my arm and she is beside me and holding on tight and we cross the great floor of the Reception Hall together. We turn at the door and a panel is there, which I open, and faces are pressed against the windows all along this side of the bus. Our friends are looking at us and waving and Edna and I wave in return. Then I touch the panel and the Reception Hall is filled with a bright light and the floor beneath the bus slides open and the bus descends, the hands still waving, the bus sinks down till the faces dip beneath the level of the floor and then the waving fingertips are gone and the roof of the bus and the floor slides and it seals itself shut and the light vanishes and there is a sudden jagged clutch of fear inside me, as if my friends have just gone down with a great ship to a watery grave. But I know their wheels will soon be spinning on Interstate 10. They will be chasing their luck once more. And so will I.

  18

  When a girl from Bovary, Alabama, finds herself married to a bona fide spaceman and she goes away to far galaxies and tries to be a good wife out there in outer space, in spite of all her life up to then she being afraid of change and taking a chance and going too far from home—and let’s face it, when I say “girl” I don’t mean “girl,” I mean a forty-something woman who prior to this extraordinary thing happening to her had a life of what they call, in the hairdressing parlors of Bovary, “dignified simplicity” or sometimes “simple Southern grace” or sometimes just “lost hopes and blown chances”—I can admit all that now, being forty-plus and having a life like that—so when such a woman like me finds herself alone in an invisible spacecraft sitting in a field of witch grass out behind the place where her motor home once sat, the very place where her spaceman husband parked this very craft on the night he came a-courting her after having met her in the parking lot of the all-night Wal-Mart Supercenter, like God Himself had wanted us to meet—when she finds herself sitting there and she’s all alone in an alien vessel except for her yellow cat Eddie purring on her lap and she doesn’t know whether her dear sweet spaceman husband is being ripped to pieces by an angry Earth mob even at that very moment, and she being under directions from him to wait for two hours after midnight, New York City Time, and if she doesn’t get his radio message by that time she is to push a certain button and step out of this machine and try to resume her life in her former hometown and try not to read the newspapers for a few days because under those circumstances the news was certainly going to be bad about what had happened to her husband, and when a woman like that—who’s me, of course—even has a way to make a record of her voice while she waits, which her husband has showed her as he is saying good-bye and putting her in this spacecraft and is giving her a kiss in that sweet lipless way of his—though being lipless isn’t a way, exactly, it’s more like a condition, which just goes to show how much I love him because the touch of his spaceman mouth is about as happy a thing for me as I could ever imagine and I pray that I will have a chance to be that happy again—but he gave me a kiss and he showed me what to do and here I sit, and in a situation like this, even with the chance to talk—and I don’t think there’s a tape or anything in this thing to run out, I can go on as long as I want—but when a woman—even a woman like me—finds herself in a situation like this, she is pretty much left at a loss for words, which is what I am right now. Except to say that when the door w
as closing and I was looking at my spaceman husband maybe for the last time ever, he began to do something I have never seen him do.

  Desi wept.

  19

  Citrus’s kiss is still burning on my cheek when my hand goes to the ship’s guidance panel. My wife Edna Bradshaw, along with our yellow cat Eddie, has already been dispatched to wait in a place where she can resume a life on Earth if her spaceman husband in fact fulfills the destiny of Murdered God.

  And I wept. In sending Edna Bradshaw away not knowing if I would ever see her again, I at last found my way to the Earthlings’ private sea. I opened a door inside me and there it was, and I strode forward and into the waves and there were voices all around me, all the voices I had taken into my own mouth, all the voices who knew how to live intensely in that sensual space out there between one mind and another, and the sea rose up and filled my eyes and I closed the door of the shuttle craft and Edna was weeping too.

  And yet, poised now before the guidance panel, it is not the track of my first tears that I am feeling as I make these last decisions that will seal my fate, it is Citrus’s kiss, a kiss that burns like a brand on my body. And the brand is NYC. New York City. I am Signed Sealed ’n’ Delivered. I even move my hand and my spaceship slides smoothly across Louisiana and Mississippi and Alabama and so forth, picking up the Appalachian Mountains in Virginia and all I can think is, New York Here I Come. And yes, I understand that this coming I am about to make—the coming of a real-live rootin’-tootin’ no-doubt-about-it space alien—especially at this millennially portentous moment—will be just about as big, newswise, on planet Earth as if I were the coming of the man Citrus believes me to be.

  But even as I think those things, I also think of my chosen twelve racing through the night. Come to Louisiana For to Have Some Fun. Then I think of Hudson’s words, and Hank’s. I do not have to maximize the risks. There might be a place more inclined to accept me. And I think of my great yummy pecan ball of a wife sitting in the place where I came to woo her, frightened for me now, expecting to be widowed. And I think about me. Me me me me me. Why not me? I am. That is me. What does me want? What does me yearn for?

  Okay, I think. Okay. I move my hand and I am back in Louisiana. I speed to the Crescent City, the Queen of the South, the City that Care Forgot, New Orleans. And I consult the information we have on the place and midnight is approaching and I hover now twenty miles directly above the exact spot in New Orleans that seems to me, from what is known by our research, to be the exact right spot for my purpose, and I magnify the image of New Orleans on my screen and I see the curve of the Mississippi River through the French Quarter and there is a public park and a square and I zoom in on this image and I see my destination and I magnify it and this choice of New Orleans was no cop-out, I realize. There is a vast throng of people here, too, also prone to freak out, I presume, and Hank was right, there is plenty of media. Too much of all of that, people and media and the potential for mass terror. I can feel no difference between this and Times Square. And I am seizing up just as badly here. But I cannot compromise any further.

  And so, I put my spacecraft on a timed instruction. I place a transmitter to the ship’s voice recorder on the lapel of my freshly starched white shirt with my Tabasco necktie and gray pin-striped suit, and I am ready, if I die, to send this vessel, empty of all but voices, back to my home planet on its own. My epitaph. And I will be content, at least, that my wife will have her old life back. Content to have the bits and pieces of my body dispersed by fire or worms or the deep sea or even held in stasis in jars in secret government labs. Content with that. Yes. Content because I will, in death, be here, on the planet Earth. Content because I will thus, in a sense, remain close to Edna Bradshaw and close to Minnie Butterworth and close to Whiplash Willie Jones and to Herbert Jenkins and to Viola Stackhouse and Hudson Smith and Claudia Lambert and all the rest of them. And that is the Bible.

  And I move my hand and my spaceship descends, straight down, from twenty miles above Jackson Square in the French Quarter of New Orleans, Louisiana, to ten miles above to five to one and the ship is cloaked and invisible, and on the screen I see the crowd roiling in anticipation, for the millennium has only a little more than a minute left in it and I am coming, I am coming to you, planet Earth, you will soon understand, and I am half a mile above and a quarter mile and my hand now is poised to uncloak this craft and my body is roiling like the crowd, roiling with the heat of the stars that you creatures there below know only as tiny bits of ancient light, I fall to you, I fall and I move my hand now and I make the ship visible to everyone and beneath me is St. Louis Cathedral with three spires, the center one, the tallest, pointing straight up at this wondrous sight, this vessel from outer space. I place the craft on its automatic settings and quickly I glide to the center of the control room.

  And I wait, stiffly, Without a Song in my Heart, and the light flares, fills my eyes, catches me tight, and I begin to sink down. I close my eyes and I try to Whistle a Happy Tune, but my mouth is too rigid to pucker and I am free of the ship and I am in the night air and I open my eyes, there are corridors of light and blooms of fireworks and a steady roar of human voices beneath me and I look down and the high center spire is aimed right at me and I move my hand and adjust the beam and I slide out, and the square before the cathedral unfolds before me, teeming with life, and I am ready to see them, see all these faces turned up to me, to this extraordinary sight, a spaceman in a felt hat and gray suit with hot-sauce bottles floating on his tie coming down in a beam of light. I focus. I blink my big old spaceman eyes and I concentrate my superior vision and I am descending into a great sea of plumes and feathers and masks and I look harder as I descend and I am passing the highest tip of the spire and I descend toward an enormous pink rabbit—the Energizer battery bunny who Keeps On Going—and a human Coke can, a face framed in the ring of the pull tab, and a woman warrior with plastic breastplates and brandishing an aluminum-foil sword and a nearly naked King Neptune with trident and sea-shell jockstrap and a man shrouded in a great, full-body rubber sheath with French Tickler top and a gang of bikers in black leather but with great swaths of their jackets and pants missing showing their flesh beneath, and I look more widely at the crowd and some faces are clearly focused on me, some hands point and wave, and I realize I am missing my opportunity, I am being the spectator not the show, and I wave in return and a trio of nuns, side by side, see me and they return my wave and then in unison they clap their hands against the center of their chests—it is the mea culpa, they feel they have sinned—and I am about to spread my hands before them, to offer them reassurance, but before I do, they all three open wide the fronts of their habits and expose their breasts—three pairs of pink, wondering eyes stare up at me—and the habits close and the nuns acknowledge the applause of those around them and they receive the kisses of the bikers and I am falling into confusion in this column of light and I scan the crowd, trying to understand, and suddenly I realize that I have won, at last, the attention of much of the crowd, I feel all eyes on me, and the nuns have taught me something—a precious lesson I should have learned already—I have dressed in my suit and shirt and tie, as if I were an Earthling myself—what a basic blunder I have made—and I rip off my hat and my tie, and my spaceman face, at least, is nakedly clear—I will not fail in what I must do—I heighten my voice to be heard far and wide and I do not plan what to say, I trust the words to come, and I begin, “I am a friendly guy come from a distant planet. You are not alone.” And though my voice is loud, the crowd is louder—they are not alone, they are one voice, uttering a sound like the sea, roaring in a storm—and I am descending farther, getting closer and closer, but I sense the moment of all eyes being on me has passed, most of the eyes have remained where they were even as I have moved—in spite of my face being clearly visible now—and I glance back and above me and it is the clock they were watching—and they still are—the new millennium is coming, only seconds away, and they are focused on this
moment, on this moment in their senses, in the company of each other, and I look out at them and they are indeed a vast sea, they are moved by a great rising wave, all of them together, bunny and biker, Neptune and nun, Coke can and condom, they are one people, and I know why I have made my blunder, why I descended dressed as one of them, and I fall in my column of light past the great front doors of the cathedral and I know my own yearning clearly now, even as a man in ostrich feathers and a woman in combat fatigues press back against the crowd to make a place for me. And the crowd cries out “Three, two, one!” and then there is a great roar and my eyes are full of tears and the wave lifts us all and I swim into the crowd hugging and being hugged, kissing and being kissed.

  20

  I am. Still. I am more than ever. I sent the ship back to where it came from. I told my species to stay away for a century or two, at the very least. My wife Edna Bradshaw and I have taken a little place in an old slave house in a courtyard full of jasmine and bougainvillea in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Edna does hairdressing. People talk to her. She talks to them. She is happy about that, though I will be forever grateful to her for her willingness to give up those things to be my wife, when we could never have expected this outcome. Eddie the yellow cat likes our little place, too, though I sometimes must rescue a gecko from his grasp.